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The CITE, a blog published by the National Association of College Stores, takes a look at the intersection of education and technology, highlighting issues that range from course materials to learning delivery to the student experience. Comments, discussion, feedback, and ideas are welcome.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

EdX Opens Source Code to Entice Developers

EdX released the source code of its XBlock software in March.
Now, the massive open online course (MOOC) consortium has made its full source
code available to developers in an effort to quicken the pace of advances to the
platform.

“We want contributors,” said Rob Rubin, vice president
of engineering, in an Information Weekarticle.
“We’d welcome any company’s contributions and any people’s use of the edX platform.
We’re in the very early days in the development of the technology to support
learning and research about learning. Let’s all contribute to the open-source
effort to be able to rapidly evolve that for the benefits of the student.”

EdX had planned to release the code later this year or
early next year, but moved it up because some of its members wanted to
contribute code. For instance, Stanford University had code for real-time chat
and bulk e-mail ready to go, while the University of California contributed
forum and automated grading system software.

The move could also lead to MOOCs being scaled down
into SPOCs (small private online courses), according to an eCampus Newsreport.

“We want to encourage that,” Rubin said. “We are
committed to improving accessibility and we think that’s a great application.”

The early release also helps edX keep pace with
competitors such as Coursera, which just announced a partnership with 10
university systems to offer free courses on its platform.